Much of this has to do with the location of the region, geographically so distant from Delhi, and the terrain which makes it difficult to establish connections. Placed between what is now Bangladesh, Tibet, Myanmar (the former Burma) and Bhutan and with a thin land corridor linking it with the rest of India—the Chicken’s Neck near Siliguri in West Bengal and the Assam border—the North East today comprises of seven states, each vigorously different from the other. Assam and Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram and finally, Tripura. The hill states surround Assam, abutting on the other nations of South and South-East Asia. Ninety-eight per cent of the borders of the North East touch these nations. Only two per cent is connected to India, pointing to the North East’s tenuous geographical and political connectivity to the Indian mainland. Through this narrow land corridor run the only road and rail connections as well as the oil and gas pipelines connecting India to its North East. This lack of connectivity and isolation has bred extreme inequity and promoted the growth of enclave industries which are dependent on the rich natural resources of the area—tea, oil and gas as well as timber. The beneficiaries of this lopsided development have been large companies owned by a handful of individuals, especially in the tea and timber sectors, with their main offices located outside the region.

Tea has had by far the greatest social and economic impact, employing nearly 600,000 workers in Assam alone and supporting another 3.4 lakh dependents. A major exchange earner for India (in 1999, the figures were twenty billion rupees or about 500 million dollars), tea is cultivated on a major portion of the arable land in the narrow Brahmaputra Valley. This reduces the land available for ‘ordinary’ consumer crops such as rice, other cereals, vegetables and fruits. Dependence on other parts of India for imports of these products has grown and farm technology, especially the use of fertilizers and pesticides as well as of high-yielding varieties of crops, has fallen far behind other states of the ‘mainland’.

Oil and gas have been a monopoly of the Government of India for the past decades. Only in the past years has this opened up to private investment. Domestic and foreign interest in this sector has been low because of the violence and confrontations which have erupted since the North East’s first face-off with the Indian state led by the Nagas in 1952. Since then, the North East has been a simmering cauldron of ethnic divisions, militancies and insurgencies which have ripped aside the fragile veil of peace.